Poetry Readings from Dead poets

I understand that there were some poets who were alive long enough, or at the right time period, to be recorded reading their poems, and that this can help us understand the poem in a way that reading it ourselves can't. On the other hand, I feel that there's a gap due to technology between the recordings that are helpful to us, and the ones that are annoying for us to listen to. For instance, the poets recorded at the beginning of the use of auditory recordings don't seem helpful at all. The tracks are crackly often drowning out the poet, the voice speaking is so quiet you have to crank the volume up (intensifying the annoying crackle), and you can barely understand the words being spoken, or their inflection. As years progressed and the technology got better I believe the use of this tool actually became helpful, but in its earlier years...Forget about it.